On blame: You always fault the one you love

There’s an old adage that goes: “When you point one finger,
there are three fingers pointing back to you.”

When things go wrong the natural tendency for humans is to
look for someone to blame. They point their
index fingers as gestures of physical blame. They launch verbal assaults. How
destructive has it gotten? The slew of
negative ads flooding the airways during the 2012 presidential election – each
blaming the other for some perceived national shortcoming or personal
transgression – forced many Americans to question the civility of the
democratic process.

William & Mary scholar Neal Tognazzini has co-edited the
book Blame: Its Nature and Norms with
the aim of helping people understand what blame is and how it affects our moral
community. The book, published by Oxford
University Press, is a collection of essays written by scholars from across the
English-speaking world. It explores
answers to basic questions concerning the nature of blame, including what is
blame.

“One of the main questions the essays in the book attempt to
answer is what blame is – and the jury is still out,” said Tognazzini. He’s an assistant professor of philosophy and
specializes in moral responsibility and free will.

“Some scholars think blame is a judgment that you make about
ill will that someone has shown you,” he explained. “Others think it’s a matter of actually
feeling some sort of emotion, like resentment or feeling indignant toward an
individual. And others think it’s a
matter of taking some sort of overt action such as rebuking somebody or
reprimanding them.

“Or, in the case of institutional blame, we put people in
jail or punish them.”

Some theorists think that blame can take a number of forms,
as long as it’s conceived as protest, he added.

“So, as long as I’m protesting some way that you’ve treated
me, or somebody that I care about, then even if I’m just feeling it in my heart
or even if I’m just thinking about it to myself I still count as blaming you,”
he said.

Within academia, the contemporary philosophical research
being conducted by scholars such as Tognazzini takes the emotions seriously. This recent shift in thinking represents a
departure from traditional philosophers who believed that in order to be
rational one must hold the emotions at bay. How we come to terms with
understanding blame is connected to emotions such as resentment, indignation
and guilt, said Tognazzini.

“We resent people for wronging us, we are indignant to
people who wrong others and we are guilty about the wrongs that we commit,” he
said. “These are taken to be our
natural, emotional responses to people who show us ill will.”

So this naturally raises the question: if our emotions are
natural, are our habits of blame somehow hard-wired within us? “I suspect it is,” said Tognazzini.

“For some reason, we care a lot about what other people
think about us, and we care about how they treat us, he said.

“When they treat us badly that reveals to us that they
disrespect us, or think badly of us. When they don’t treat us in the way that we think our humanity gives us
a right to be treated, then it’s only natural that you’re going to be
emotionally exercised in response to that.”

Tognazzini asserts that blame marks our interpersonal
relationships. If you care enough about
someone, you will blame them as opposed to merely dismissing them as someone
not even worth your time. To blame
someone means that you’re embracing him or her as your moral peer, which
Tognazzini called a “double-edged sword.”

“Blame is both a dangerous thing that can harm us, and harm
our relationships, but it’s also a good thing that can really help our
relationships,” he said. “Blame often
manifests itself in anger and harsh words, which can alienate people and sever relationships. So, in a very natural way, blame is a harmful
thing; it’s meant to be harmful in some sense.

“But it’s also our way of standing up for what we think is
right,” he added. “Even though blame can
be harmful, without it we wouldn’t be taking morality as seriously as it
deserves to be taken.”

Before you blame someone or something, Tognazzini suggests
taking a step back and examining the moral function of blame.

For example, Tognazzini cites his relationship with Geneva,
his 2-year-old daughter.

“I may get frustrated and annoyed, but I don’t blame her,
yet,” he said. “That’s because I don’t
think my daughter yet has all the capacities that make her fully morally
responsible.”

As she grows older and becomes able to participate wholly in
interpersonal relationships Tognazzini said, she’ll be held accountable for her
actions and decisions.

“Then it will be more like genuine blame and less like
fatherly frustration.”